


How Two Hands Touch

by Hecate



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-16 07:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13631664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: It takes them a while.





	How Two Hands Touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



_Oh,_ Steve thinks the first time he sees Maria, and, _She's great._. But it's a weak and surprised thought, and he still feels the ice closing in on him, still hears Peggy's goodbye whenever he lets the quiet in, and there are gods and aliens and a world that tries its best to end. So his thought means nothing, fades away between chaos and grief, fades away on the roads he takes after the battle, the bike Tony gave him a half-promise of a new beginning.

When he returns, he finds a place to live, and he works for SHIELD. It's not like there is much of a choice, not in this new time and not with this body that still feels new to him on occasion, a body that is mostly good for fighting. There is no team after New York, just SHIELD missions, Natasha and Clint coming and going like waves, Tony sending him emails with movies he should watch, books he should read, a presence at the edges of his life.

He's lonely, some days.

Maria sits with him sometimes in the mess hall. They talk about his road trip, about technology and history and the movies he watches at night, the serum keeping him awake, the TV screen filling a room that is still empty with artificial, flickering life. They make things easier, these moments with her, and maybe he could let that mean something. Maybe it does already.

"Stark made you a list?" she asks.

He nods.

"Want me to take a look at it?" It's a familiar offer.

Steve shrugs. "Natasha already did."

She smiles. "Then I should definitely take a look at it."

He sends her a mail, she writes new movies into the notebook he keeps with him, writes down the names of bands and songs.

"Does it help?" she asks, and she points at the lists he makes, the lists that grow and grow, a new world written on paper.

He nods. "It feels like a mission," he tells her, and means that it keeps him steady, gives him a purpose outside of SHIELD. She's an agent. She'll understand.

~*~ 

SHIELD falls.

Steve fights and bleeds and finds Bucky and loses him all over again.

Natasha is at his side, and then there is Sam, new and steady, and Steve almost forgot how it felt to make friends instead of allies, how to find them on your own without a war or a battle building a team, without this violent force that cuts puzzle pieces into new shapes so they fit.

And then there is Maria.

Maria saves them, Maria is steady, Maria is what SHIELD was supposed to be but isn't any longer. Later, after the fight and everything else, when he wakes up at the hospital, Steve remembers the way she said his name right before the end, with a voice that was frayed but holding. He remembers that she would have killed him to save the world.

And that doesn't hurt.

 _I like her_ , he thinks, and the thought is sharper than it was before. But Bucky is on the run, and the ruins of SHIELD are still burning. So he shrugs it off and he goes to work.

~*~ 

"Just choose a room, I've got enough," Tony says.

Steve looks at him, waits. Around him, Avengers Tower gleams with metal and technology, a memory of SHIELD but somehow softer, something human to it.

Tony gives in. "JARVIS can help you chose," he offers.

"Thank you," Steve says, and he doesn't remind Tony that it's just for a while, just until he finds a new place to live. The Tower is amazing, and it's the best headquarters he ever had, but it's work, and it's the Avengers, and he needs a place that isn't _that_.

Later, Maria finds him, and it's still a relief to see her, to know that she found a new place with the Avengers, that Tony's money and his company could do that for her. It's a relief to know that she is safe, too, that she isn't out there. He tries not to think of the agents still left in the cold, the ones that got unmasked when they dumped SHIELD's secret on the internet like the innards of the world's craziest garbage can. There is only so much he can do for them.

"Hey," he says. "Got used to the new boss already?"

She smiles, shrugs. "He keeps on telling me he isn't my boss. I'm almost worried about getting paid."

Steve laughs, asks, "If he isn't, who is?"

Maria looks at him then, her smile still lingering. "You," she says.

"Oh," Steve replies.

~*~ 

Before it all shatters, before the party and the quiet moments after are taken away by a monster of Tony's making, he danced with Maria.

He saw Tony smirking at them, saw Natasha smile.

Felt Maria in his arms, alive, guiding him through the steps, and he thought he would have danced with Peggy like this, could have danced with her like this. But it's gone, that possibility, and it was Maria with him, pulling him close as she spun back into his embrace. It was Maria who looked up at him, a breath away, and he thought of kissing her later when it was quieter still and it could be just the two of them.

And he thought, just for a moment, that maybe life goes on, even if it’s developed a limp.

~*~ 

Ultron is a mess, is a disaster. And it hurts how angry he is with Tony, how angry he is with himself because he didn't see it coming, didn't see the way Tony lost himself in trying to save them.

He should have seen it.

Somebody should have seen it.

"Sometimes things just get screwed up," Maria reminds him. They are sitting in the dark, the new Avengers Compound eerily empty around them. Soon, it will fill with life, with the routines of missions and training and saving the world. But now, it's just them in a room facing the woods that embrace the building like a lover, the window reaching from the ground to the ceiling.

"I know," he says, and he thinks of Bucky falling, thinks of the plane and the ice and the time he has lost. Outside, the tree-branches sway in the wind.

He thinks about taking her hand.

And doesn't.

~*~ 

There is this moment, him and Bucky on T'challa's plane, when Steve thinks of Tony talking about the Accords, thinks of seeing him with Natasha and Maria in a meeting room, the glass between them like a battlefront, and he realizes with sharp certainty that he will miss them.

He realizes that he should have kissed her.

It's painful, but Bucky is on his side, hurt yet safe. It has to be enough. In Wakanda, with the sun beating down on him and Bucky back in Cryo, he finds out that it barely is.

~*~ 

He calls Tony the moment Thanos and his army ride into their world with an apocalypse on their heels. It's Maria who answers.

"He's busy," she says.

Steve doesn't ask what Tony is doing, knows him well enough to guess. "He's building something."

Laughter, a pained noise after. "Yeah, he's building something."

"Is it gonna be worse than Thanos?" Steve asks.

Maria's voice is sharp when she replies, bitterly fierce. "I hope it is."

And he thinks that Thanos hit New York first, thinks that Tony had been there; Maria, too.

"You're injured," he says.

"Everybody is," she tells him, and Steve doesn't ask her how many people they lost already, doesn't ask who died.

Instead, he makes a promise. "I'll be there soon."

"You better," Maria says, and Steve hopes it's not only her exhaustion that softens her voice.

~*~ 

Maria's voice is in his ear as he fights, her calm spreading through the comms, and he hates that he didn't see her before the battle came for them. But it is what it is, and when she tells him to jump out of the building, tells him that Falcon will be there to catch him, he doesn't hesitate.

~*~ 

There's blood in his eyes, and blood on his hands, and the dust refuses to settle, dances around him like an angry drunk. There is screaming too, people and sirens. Something is burning.

He's alive.

Thanos is dead.

Tony finds him, the light of the reactor dim in the wreckage, and they both stumble to the waiting quintjet. Natasha is waiting for them, a cut running across her face, splitting her lips, her arm twisted in a way that makes Steve sick just looking at it. Clint is a heap in a corner, his left hand wrapped tightly across his shoulder. Sam is there, too, his wings a charred mess, the burns reaching past the metal and stretching across the skin of his back. Banner is silent.

Natasha tells him that she reached out for Wanda, that she is alive, that Vision is with her. "They're on the way," she says, and he nods, and slumps on one of the benches.

"Good," he says. "Good," he repeats.

He listens as Tony calls Rhodey, listens to them as Rhodey says again and again that he's fine, that Pepper is fine, "Everything is fine, Tony, promise, stop freaking out," and he wonders when relief will finally hit him, when the moment will get easier.

Somehow, they make it to the compound, the jet shuddering in the air like an injured animal. Maria is waiting for them.

"Welcome back," she says, and she looks at Steve, and there are bruises on her face, and she looks so damn tired.

Steve nods, stands still as the others walk past them, a line of the victorious that looks anything but. Maria stays with him.

"I'm glad you're okay," she says when they're alone.

He nods, shrugs, says, "I don't feel okay."

Maria smiles. "I know," she says. "But maybe tomorrow."

He kisses her then, careful and slow, because he didn't before, because there were moments in Wakanda and moments during the battle when he thought he never would. And it's a good kiss, but it's tired, too, and maybe it's not what a first kiss should be. Steve doesn't care. He feels her palms settle on his hips, warm and real, and they're an anchor, and they pull him closer to the world again.

"Yeah," he agrees when they pull apart, "maybe tomorrow."


End file.
